Bryan Cheyette
Zangwill’s Play “The Melting Pot”
Summary
Bryan Cheyette discusses the power and influence of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play The Melting Pot.
Bryan Cheyette
Bryan Cheyette is emeritus professor of modern literature and culture at the University of Reading and a research fellow at the University of Southampton. He has published eleven books which include Constructions of “the Jew” in English Literature in Society (1994), Muriel Spark (2000), Diasporas of the Mind, (2014), and, most recently, The Ghetto: A Very Short Introduction (2020). A series editor for Bloomsbury (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing), he has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania.
That’s interesting. I don’t think Miller read Zangwill’s The Melting Pot. I might be wrong, but he might well have heard of Roosevelt who did use The Crucible. And I quoted Roosevelt very much on his use of the term “crucible.” And if you think of that as being anti-democratic and forcing people into a single mould, that might may well have influenced Arthur Miller. I think that’s a really interesting question, and I haven’t thought of that before. There’s also another intertextual link here with the idea of the crucible, the idea of this melting pot, which goes back to the origins of the term ghetto. So the origins of the term ghetto actually are from Italy, as I’ve said, from Venice. It’s a Venetian term in the Venetian dialect. Ghèto, which means coming from the copper foundry. It’s an area in Venice. It’s a noun when it was first used. But it is about a copper foundry. So there is some kind of link, perhaps mysterious, perhaps accidental between the origins of the word ghetto in a copper foundry and the melting pot via the crucible today.
That’s really interesting. There were always 19th-century Anglo-Jewish novelists, but certainly when it came to the most famous and the most impactful, popular representations, images of Jews, it was by non-Jewish writers. Sir Walter Scott, George Elliott, and Daniel Deronda, even Trollope, Madame Melmotte in the Palliser novels. These were very popular images of Jews. But Zangwill, I think, was not particularly influenced by Deronda. Amy Levy, who was an Anglo-Jewish writer before him, and was a very important Anglo-Jewish writer who wrote Ruben Sachs, and that influence Zangwill more than anything. And David Quixano’s name comes from that novel, Ruben Sachs. She rejected completely Daniel Deronda as being idolized, idealistic, and Deronda not really being a Jewish figure. And I think Zangwill felt the same. And I think probably what motivated him in writing Children of the Ghetto and writing his early Jewish stories was precisely to write much more truthful versions of Jews and also Zionism as well in Daniel Deronda, which is a much more complex feature of Children of the Ghetto than it is of Daniel Deronda. So I think, my sense is, my strong sense is that he wrote against Daniel Deronda. That it was an influence in that way. It was a negative influence, if you like.
Ah! As I say, excuse the phrase, and in a way, Trudy showed this as well, he was a Jewish Trinitarian. So he had a notion of Jewishness, of Hebrewism and of being an Israelite as well. He did believe strongly in Jewish spirituality. And the ghetto for him was also a place of spirituality and of Jewish spirituality. He strongly believed in that. He strongly believed in Hebrewism that was progressive and was on the side of good and on the side of the powerless and helping the poor and the powerless and the suffering. So I think those were his Jewish ethical values, and ultimately that’s what drove him in terms of his territorialism, in terms of his idea of the ghetto and the melting pot. So it’s Jewish ethical values that I think are key to Zangwill.